It rots a writers brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily youre well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician. – John Updike
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. – John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. – John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. – John Updike
On bad days, I think Id like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, Yeah, right, Im going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school. No. No. – Tama Janowitz